Residents vow to retake North Camden

Saturday, July 03, 2010

By Lucas K. Murray

lmurray@sjnewsco.com

CAMDEN ÊIt's a four-block walk down 6th Street from
Northgate Park to the North Camden Community Center that
borders Pyne Poynt Park at the Delaware River. It's
also a walk that cuts though one of the most-dangerous
neighborhoods in all of Camden City.

Nearly a dozen boarded-up homes are found here. Drug pushers
lean close to vehicles looking to make sales near shells of
buildings smelling still of burnt timber.

Vacant lots are dotted with evidence of drug use.
There's a mural on one wall bearing more than two-dozen
names of neighborhood residents who have died in the past
quarter-century.

But it's here where city officials are looking to
strike deep into the heart of North Camden to work from the
inside out to effect change. State Street and 6th Street,
which connects this part of town to the rest, are now
designated as "Clean and Safe Corridors."

"I do not want our families living in fear or being
held hostage by some of the criminal elements that are out
there," Mayor Dana Redd said Thursday. "We are
here to say we will not tolerate it in the city of
Camden."

Redd, along with community and political leaders as well as
Police Chief J. Scott Thompson and nearly four dozen of the
youngest residents of this part of town, marched a distance
longer than four football fields shouting a call for safe
streets.

"I certainly believe if we want to bring about change,
we need to not only walk the walk, but also have to be about
our talk," Redd said. "We have to put words into
action."

That action comes as 41 new Camden Police officers are on the street. Chief Thompson said the two public parks serve as anchors to the north and south. State Street bisects the area and crosses the Cooper River, running east to west....